Public writing involves extending beyond your professional, academic, personal or local activist community to reach a broader audience. The goals of public writing vary but most often the purpose is to inform and move readers to action. In most cases, we find ourselves at a loss in terms of how to translate our knowledge and understanding into writing that is accessible for an audience that has limited knowledge and awareness of the issue, whether it has to do with major concerns, such as a medical or environmental crisis, a new technology, a change in government policy, an abridgment of human rights; or with a more local concern, such as letting your neighborhood know about the value of adding native plants to their gardens or the need for street repairs. Genres of public writing are far-ranging and include opinion pieces, white papers, infographics, petitions, memes, protest signs, obituaries, social media posts, and blogging platforms such as Substack and Medium. This course will focus on how to narrow the topic of your writing to reach the “publics” that are your target audiences, how to analyze and write for the particular genre and audience you select, how to translate your own knowledge and expertise into more accessible writing, how to evaluate and construct your identity or that of your organization in relation to this public outreach, and how to take into account the possible uptakes of your writing, how it will be used and circulated, and by whom, as well as assessing its potential ongoing impact and migration to unintended audiences. The two major pieces students will develop in this course are an op-ed and a white paper, the first an excellent way to reach the public with a short, well-constructed argument; the second an outstanding way to reach a nonspecialist public audience in the midst of deciding how and why to act upon something. White papers are used by everyone from politicians and bureaucrats to churches, academics, activists, and industry in an effort to inform a broader audience.
*Academic credit is defined by the University of Pennsylvania as a course unit (c.u.). A course unit (c.u.) is a general measure of academic work over a period of time, typically a term (semester or summer). A c.u. (or a fraction of a c.u.) represents different types of academic work across different types of academic programs and is the basic unit of progress toward a degree. One c.u. is usually converted to a four-semester-hour course.
- Faculty Director, Penn LPS Online Certificate in Professional Writing
Valerie Ross is the retired senior director of The Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, founder of its Critical Writing Program, and an editor of the Journal of Writing Analytics. Her current research and publications focus on writing in the… Read more
